For years, the digital news industry has navigated shifting tides, from the decimation of print to the capricious algorithms of social media. Now, a new storm looms, threatening to upend the very foundation of online publishing: the rise of AI-powered chatbots and the precipitous decline of Google search traffic.
WSJ reports that publishers, once reliant on the steady flow of clicks from the search giant, are facing what many are calling an “AI Armageddon,” forcing a radical rethinking of their business models.
Chatbots are increasingly replacing traditional Google searches, providing users with direct answers and eliminating the need to click on those familiar blue links. This shift has begun to starve news sites of the referral traffic they’ve depended on for over a decade.
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According to WSJ, the numbers paint a stark picture. For instance, HuffPost has seen its organic search traffic to desktop and mobile websites plummet by more than half in the past three years. The Washington Post has experienced a nearly identical decline in organic search referrals. Business Insider recently cut approximately 21% of its staff, with CEO Barbara Peng citing “extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Their organic search traffic to websites declined by a staggering 55% between April 2022 and April 2025.
At The New York Times, the share of traffic originating from organic search slid to 36.5% in April 2025, down from almost 44% three years prior. Even The Wall Street Journal, which saw an overall increase in organic search traffic in April compared to three years prior, witnessed its share of overall traffic from search decline to 24% from 29%.
“Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” remarked Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. At a company-wide meeting earlier this year, Thompson reportedly urged his team to “assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero.” The Atlantic, he stated, “needed to evolve its business model.”
The introduction of Google’s AI Overviews last year, which summarize search results at the top of the page, has already dented traffic to content like vacation guides, health tips, and product reviews. The recent U.S. rollout of AI Mode, designed to directly compete with chatbots like ChatGPT, is expected to deliver an even more significant blow, as it responds to user queries in a conversational style with significantly fewer links.
“The rapid development of click-free answers in search is a serious threat to journalism that should not be underestimated,” warned William Lewis, publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post, emphasizing the need for the publication to “move with urgency” to connect with overlooked audiences and cultivate new revenue streams in a “post-search era.”
This dramatic power shift underscores the immense influence Google wields in the digital ecosystem, reinforcing long-standing allegations of monopoly. Google’s ability to fundamentally alter how users access information, and consequently how publishers receive traffic, highlights its near-absolute control over a critical gateway to the internet.
While Google executives maintain their commitment to sending traffic to the web and suggest that users who click on links after seeing AI Overviews tend to spend more time on those sites, the reality on the ground for many publishers is grim. Google also states it prioritizes links to news sites and may not show AI Overviews for trending news, but queries for older articles and lifestyle content are more likely to generate an overview.
This isn’t the first technological upheaval for news organizations. The internet itself decimated print publications, and social media, while initially a boon for traffic, eventually pivoted away from prioritizing news. However, many industry leaders believe generative AI represents a fundamental rewiring of internet usage.
“AI was not the thing that was changing everything, but it will be going forward. It’s the last straw,” stated Neil Vogel, CEO of Dotdash Meredith, a media giant encompassing brands like People and Southern Living. Vogel revealed that when Dotdash merged with Meredith in 2021, Google search accounted for roughly 60% of their traffic; today, it’s approximately one-third.
Forced to Adapt
In response to dwindling search referrals and already challenging trends like declining public trust and fierce competition, online news outlets are intensifying their efforts to forge direct connections with readers. This includes a renewed focus on newsletters, improved apps, print magazines, and even live conferences.
The Atlantic, for instance, is prioritizing reader relationships through an enhanced app, more print issues, and increased investment in events, reporting rising subscriptions and advertising revenue. Similarly, leaders at Politico and Business Insider, both owned by Axel Springer, are emphasizing audience engagement.
And There Is A Copyright Battle
Adding another layer of complexity, publishers are also grappling with the protection of their copyrighted material. The large language models powering these new chatbots are trained on vast datasets scraped from the open web, including news articles.
This has led to both legal battles, with some media companies suing AI startups for copyright infringement, and strategic licensing deals. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, while News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, has a content deal with OpenAI and a pending lawsuit against Perplexity.
Meanwhile, many observers believe the generative AI race is becoming a significant threat to Google’s own core search business, and this development could spell even more trouble for the tech giant. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), citing concerns about Google’s dominance and its impact on competition, has already launched efforts to break up the company. The very actions Google is taking to compete in the AI space, which are simultaneously impacting news publishers, could provide further ammunition for these antitrust cases.
The Apple Safari Effect
However, a glimmer of hope for minimizing Google’s long-standing dominance comes from an unexpected quarter: Apple. An Apple executive recently testified in federal court that Google searches in Safari, the iPhone maker’s browser, had recently fallen for the first time in two decades, despite Google reporting an increase in total searches on Apple devices.
This is particularly significant given the long-standing arrangement where Google pays Apple billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on Apple devices. If Apple were to reduce its reliance on Google or even develop its own search solution, it could fundamentally alter the competitive landscape and offer a much-needed alternative to Google’s pervasive influence.
The “AI armageddon” for online news publishers is not just a hypothetical threat; it’s a present reality forcing an industry-wide scramble to innovate, adapt, and build direct, indispensable relationships with their audiences in a post-search world.